


Shawarma After

by calicokat



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:14:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calicokat/pseuds/calicokat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers leave Loki chained up outside on the street while they retreat into a New York diner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shawarma After

The first vestiges of twilight darken the smoke-choked evening sky like a slowly spreading bruise. The air smells of char. The sirens of human rescue craft wail through the debris-strewn streets.

Loki is chained to a metal post he could, with the proper motivation, kick apart, if he could not merely break his bonds in the first place. He does not presently enjoy vigor enough to overcome either. The tortures the Chitauri subjected him to in the name of preparation and enlightenment far outstripped the thrashing dealt to him by the Hulk, but his body is nevertheless exhausted.

He has been thwarted and outwitted in the most humiliating ways since his arrival on Earth. Knocked onto his face when attempting to dispatch a feeble old man. Hauled from an aircraft by his brother in front of Captain America and the Iron Man. Played for a fool by the Black Widow. Blown through a wall by a dying mortal with a weapon of human make. Stopped cold by Tony Stark's metal implant, an accoutrement Barton had recounted as a weakness. Knocked reeling as the Iron Man armor blasted off in pursuit of its master and floored again when Iron Man arose from below. Overwhelmed looking out over the chaos of a battle he could no longer hope to lead. Forced to flee Thor's rage. Blown off an airsled by an arrow tipped with a bomb before he could eliminate the Black Widow. Devastated by the Hulk who dispatched with him as if he was little more than a child's toy.

Now, on this empty street, Loki is alone and sick with sorrow. The so-called "Avengers" have entered a restaurant a block away to celebrate their victory by glutting themselves. Loki's hungry stomach twinges pitifully. The entire undertaking was a mess and a loss and the Avengers are adding insult to defeat by leaving him to view this devastated but monotonous vista.

The child who enters the street commands Loki's immediate attention by virtue of her novelty against the backdrop of the ruined and lifeless city. She is little more than a babe. Her clothes are stained with dirt and damp blooms of blood – too much blood for it to be her own. Her hair is all but free of the tie tangled in it, full of fly-aways. He can see her exhaustion: her gaze swooning, her lashes fluttering to stave off unconsciousness. Shock and bewilderment, too, are etched on her young face.

Loki makes no effort to draw her attention, but she finally spots him. Her eyes grow wide, but her expression of hope is quickly overwritten with fear and worry. She runs to him, regardless, as desperate as she is afraid. She has been crying. Tear tracks have left lines of clean skin on her dirt flecked face.

"Help me!" the girl demands with all the prepossession afforded a creature of her scant years, swallowing in apprehension of her own boldness.

"I have no means to help you. My hands are tied," Loki says, his voice sharp with spite. There is no other venting his misery other than on this snotting little creature.

"You have to," the child asserts. "There's nobody else anywhere."

"An irrational conclusion on your part," Loki says sourly. The girl is too young to understand him, but canny enough to see he doesn't intend to help her. She begins to cry. Hiccups soon punctuate the sobs wracking her small body.

Sore inside, Loki marvels at her fragility. Human adults are made of feeble enough stuff. Their young are nothing but a few pounds of fatty flesh clinging to weak cartilage and bone. Loki cannot help but despise the child's powerlessness. Thor prizes giving these beings complete independence, but how could they not be better off with a ruler to bring their petitions to – a ruler with the power to realize their better ambitions and deny them their more foolhardy and violent ones?

Here sits their would-be king, not completely powerless, even now, but thoroughly sick of them.

The girl collapses onto the pavement, a blubbering heap of child. Her pitiful cries cut sharp slices in Loki's patience. Anger rises in through them, and unwanted sentiment and sympathy.

"Where are your minders?" Loki finally asks.

There is a silent moment in time in which the girl freezes except for a single shudder. The silence ends violently; her words burst from her alongside fresh tears:

"They killed mom and dad! The dog men killed them."

Loki had suspected as much could be true, but the words sit heavy with him. He looks away from her, toward the door his brother and that gang of meddlesome humans disappeared into. It's possible, if he shouts, they'll attend to him and come take responsibility for the child. It's equally possible they'll ignore him – yet another humiliation, one he detests the thought of.

"Are you sure?" he asks. Loki doesn't have a good sense for estimating the age of a human child, but he doubts she's a decade old and, living in a modern human city where death is shut away in institutions for the ill, she can't have seen many people die.

The girl pulls a long, soggy inhalation through her nose, battling for the air to speak, her hiccups persisting. She nods emphatic affirmative.

"Just like Pancake."

Loki's brow narrows. He visually investigates her a minute in silence. The words are meaningless to him.

"Like 'pancake'?" he cautiously parrots.

The little girl's voice drops to a whisper, her tear-swollen eyes sincere.

"He's my cat."

 _He_ was _your cat,_ Loki thinks without correcting her.

The memory of Loki's father – of Odin – lying pale and still on the steps of the treasure room leaps to the fore of Loki's thoughts. Such fear he felt as he rushed to his father's side, such terrible wonder not knowing if his father was yet living or if by his malfeasance he had delivered Odin to Valhalla.

The sense that there is something inutterably wrong with him surges within him once again as it did then, in that room, where he hesitated to touch his father lest the touch of a monster seal Odin's fate.

Humans die by hundred thousand every day, many at the hands of other humans. They slaughter non-human species with even fiercer violence. The blood of slaughtered animals floods gutters across their fragile planet whose soil drinks the red waste of their excess. The lives lost today on this island would have been a truly small sacrifice for the sake of putting Earth in order, should Loki have proven victorious. In his intermittent inhalations of her power, the Tessaract had deluded him with visions of a world screaming for a savior that's salvation lay within his grasp. He can still see them in his mind's eye: unattainable, perhaps even mad.

In place of his imperial rule there is only the sunlight breaking into the day's last rays over a siren-filled, wailing city and a child – filthy from the debris – crying.

"Poor, terrified thing," Loki murmurs.

The girl, hearing him, makes some pathetic attempt at staunching her tears by sniffing back the mucus running from her nose. She fails valiantly.

Loki considers all the things he could say to her. She is not old enough to understand an apology – to connect Loki's claim of culpability to her mother's death at the hands of Chituari warriors. She seeks succor, but Loki is in no mood to spoon her lies about an immediate future that won't be difficult and miserable. Throughout his entire childhood and over a thousand years longer he was spoonfed lies under the auspices of mercy, an act far crueler than his parents – though, now lucid, he can no longer deny to himself that they loved him – could know.

"It's going to be hard for you," he tells her. While still sobbing, the child's body language tells him she attends to him. "It will be hard, and you will be frightened. You'll be confused, and lost, and you will hurt and your life will never be the same: but you _will_ survive this," he promises.

They are none of them words she wants to hear. Frustrated, she balls her little fists up and shrieks at the top of her tiny lungs. Her scream echoes off the scorched and shattered faces of the surrounding buildings.

A child's scream is, of course, enough to command the Avengers' attention. Captain America sticks his blonde head out the door of the restaurant. Another few moments and the captain and Loki's brother are striding to them with faces darkened by suspicion.

Captain America softens utterly as he crouches next to the girl, asking "Are you alright?" in kind concern.

Thor has interposed himself between the child and Loki and looks powerfully annoyed – a sentiment that Loki silently echoes, having done the girl no wrong.

The girl is inconsolable. She screams again in a voice that tears at her throat, beating her fists against the pavement. Captain America begins making hushing sounds and picks her up for her own good, although she thrashes and starts to yell "Leggo, leggo, leggo!"

Now everyone, including the staff of the food establishment, is outside on the street. Save for the Black Widow, stalking over with determination on her face, the rest of the Avengers do not approach, but Loki can read the disapproval in their body language from here.

Loki begins to laugh.

Mirth, though hysterical, has overwhelmed him. His body shakes with the laughter that's falling out of him like an avalanche.

Thor's amazed, appalled and just-slightly-frightened face only redoubles it.

Loki falls helplessly onto his side, face turned toward the asphalt, his boots futilely scraping the pavement. He's worse immobilized this way, but no matter. He wasn't going anywhere to begin with.

Thor, who has seen many men and women go mad from war, is shaken from his stupor by Loki's collapse. He crouches beside Loki, stroking his hair and his shoulder with one strong hand, murmuring "I am with you" in their native tongue. It is no balm to Loki.

Black Widow takes the weeping girl from Captain America. Loki can see through the tears his laughter has brought to his eyes that she's no more adroit at handling a child than the confused-looking super soldier. She's simply the better bluffer. She tries several tactics in succession until she manages to quiet the girl.

Now Loki's raucous laughter is the only noise. Loki kicks his boot against the ground but cannot staunch his laugh, laughing as if possessed as tears roll from his eyes.

"Are we even going to _try_ and shut him up? Because I'll be honest, he's starting to creep me," Iron Man, now here, too, along with Hawkeye and the beast, says. The eatery staff seem to have retreated inside.

"Loki, please quiet yourself," Thor says to him softly, apologizing in English to the others with: "I suspect it is the duress he has been under that ails him. We should not have left him here alone."

"Something 'ails him' besides 'crazy'?" Barton asks. 

Loki can hear Barton's hatred of him in his voice.

He remembers Thor being willing enough to leave him when Barton and Stark insisted it would be inappropriate to bring him inside the establishment. His brother: ever brimming with retrospective moral fortitude.

Loki's laughter continues unabated, although his lungs heave for air between peals. He years to explain himself: that this is all too perfectly terrible. That almost every act that he has undertaken after gouging out the screaming human's eye has embarrassed him in front of someone. That hundreds of humans are dead to no purpose. That Earth spins on with the little lives carried out on its skin still wracked with the same chaotic bloodshed and will spin on that way despite the Avengers' noble efforts.

"You _imbeciles,_ " he gasps between breathing and laughing. "You have no more than spat in Fate's eye!"

"Alright. I'm shutting him up," Hawkeye warns. 

Loki had imagined something more vicious than Barton's weapon of choice: a gag summarily cut from Loki's own coat that Barton pulls tight and cinches behind his head. Loki is left to wheeze through his nose, more than one unbecoming snort blown through his nostrils before dizziness overwhelms him and he falls into mirthless heavy breathing.

Loki would ask them if they enjoyed their meal while he suffered outside, but his tongue is useless to him in his gagged mouth.

Thor holds him in his arms not unlike how Black Widow cradles the girl as Barton then releases him from bondage. 

Iron Man is drumming his fingers against his jeans and scanning the skyline. The monster is scratching his scalp. Captain America is looking down on him, face caught in a cringe.

"Don't you _dare_ feel sorry for him!" Barton barks as he stands, voice cracking with emotion.

The captain's face snaps to an expression of steel professionalism, jaw squaring.

Loki shoves himself away from Thor and staggers, albeit unsteadily, to his feet. He despises the thought of being seen accepting succor from his brother in the face of these mortals' scrutiny. He draws two more ragged breaths upon holding himself upright before air comes naturally to him.

They are all silent as they make their way from the wreckage to where the Avengers can communicate with an extraction team.


End file.
